Abstract.
Goal-directed behaviour is often viewed as an essential characteristic
of an intelligent system, but mechanisms to generate and manage goals are often overlooked. This
paper addresses this by presenting a framework for autonomous goal
generation and selection. The framework has been implemented as
part of an intelligent mobile robot capable of exploring unknown space
and determining the category of rooms autonomously. We demonstrate the efficacy of
our approach by comparing the performance of two versions of our
integrated system: one with the framework, the other without. This
investigation leads us conclude that such a framework is
desirable for an integrated intelligent system because it reduces the
complexity of the problems that must be solved by other
behaviour-generation mechanisms, it makes goal-directed behaviour more
robust in the face of a dynamic and unpredictable environments, and it
provides an entry point for domain-specific knowledge in a more
general system.